Rating: 
Summary: Bargain-Basement Dick.
Review: This book is early Dick, not the shaggy-dog's-tale, brilliantly-crazy 60's Dick, not as searing or sad as 70's Dick. As close to mainstream sci-fi as Dick gets, and if you've read much Phil K. Dick, less enjoyable. Parts are like Flannery O'Connor on real bad acid, which sounds better than "The World Jones Made" reads
Rating: 
Summary: Mediocre PKD=Still better than 99% of sci fi
Review: This is an early PKD and as such isn't up to the mad brilliance of his later writing... but it's got its moments. Like all PKD it makes you think, hard. Paradoxes abound.However, it shouldn't be too high on your PKD priority list.
Rating:
Summary: Simple and uncomplicated
Review: This is Dick at his most simple period of writing. There are no mind-bending journeys through the consciousness of the universe, as on later works, Ubik, and Three Stigmata. The plot is dull and unbelievable. Dick falls prey to the same trap all writers face when writing about one who sees the future: It's very easy to prove the fortune teller wrong by merely acting against all his premonitions. By his story, you would believe your actions are powerless against a vision--PURE HOGWASH. Buy Three Stigmata or Ubik and you are off to a better start.
Rating:
Summary: The Untiring Din Of An Impassioned Man
Review: This minor Philip K. Dick novel was written early in his career and is only interesting in that it plays with ideas that would later hatch full blown in his fiction. At the time he wrote it, Dick was making a huge splash as a writer of science fiction short stories and he was encouraged by his agent to produce novels. Originally, he wanted to be a mainstream novelist and by the time he had penned Jones, he had written a few non-genre books that were destined never to be published. It was his science fiction that was in demand and he was eventually embarassed by it. One friend of his even recalled him tossing around the paperback of his first novel The Solar Lottery and laughing about how such a silly thing could be chosen over his more serious work. Perhaps when he wrote The World Jones Made he was still not serious about being breathed in the same atmosphere as Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein when privately he was admiring Franz Kafka and James Joyce. But The World Jones Made is an intriguing little book with a very provocative plot. World peace has been accomplished through the imposition of Relativism, in which one person's ideas cannot be attacked. The only problem is, anyone who attacks someone else's ideas, no matter how evil those ideas are, are arrested by the government and often executed. Into this world comes a carnival psychic named Jones, a man who is doomed to repeat every year of his life. Hence his precognitive abilities only extend one year at a time. To counterattack against the tyranny of treating all people and ideas as equal, Jones creates a ministry of fear and paranoia that is at once equal to the McCarthy mania of the 50's (in this case the evil enemy are giant unicellular creatures who are floating harmlessly down towards the earth but Jones has declared as malicious invaders). He is also a fundamentalist preacher who spread hatred and the lingering shadow of the fascists of WWII and their oppresive police state. The plot branches into several strange subplots including a drug den for the wealthy where hermaphrodites make love on stage while morphing from one sex to another and a secret government experiment to genetically engineer a group of humans who could survive the atmosphere of Venus. One of the hidden gems of this novel is the portrayal of the government security agent Cussick. He is an early prototype for the Rick Dekkard of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (a.k.a. Blade Runner). A hired gun of the government just doing his job and trying to protect his paycheck while a cynical wife acts as a conscience to the evil that her husband has aligned himself with. The scene where Cussick and a fellow government agent go out on the town with their wives is both rich in character detail and psychology. In these scenes are traces of the mainstream Dick. The writing also reveals glimpses of a much more potent literary talent. In this scene Cussick and his wife make love while Jone's voice rants on the radio much like Hitler: "Locked in each other's arms, bare bodies pressed together, they were already a universe apart. Separated by the ceaseless, muffled metallic drumming of the man's voice that beat against the walls from a long way off, the never-ending harsh mutter of words, gestures, speeches. The untiring din of an impassioned man." A book not for the unitiated, but a must for the PKD fanatic.
Rating:
Summary: The Untiring Din Of An Impassioned Man
Review: This minor Philip K. Dick novel was written early in his career and is only interesting in that it plays with ideas that would later hatch full blown in his fiction. At the time he wrote it, Dick was making a huge splash as a writer of science fiction short stories and he was encouraged by his agent to produce novels. Originally, he wanted to be a mainstream novelist and by the time he had penned Jones, he had written a few non-genre books that were destined never to be published. It was his science fiction that was in demand and he was eventually embarassed by it. One friend of his even recalled him tossing around the paperback of his first novel The Solar Lottery and laughing about how such a silly thing could be chosen over his more serious work. Perhaps when he wrote The World Jones Made he was still not serious about being breathed in the same atmosphere as Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein when privately he was admiring Franz Kafka and James Joyce. But The World Jones Made is an intriguing little book with a very provocative plot. World peace has been accomplished through the imposition of Relativism, in which one person's ideas cannot be attacked. The only problem is, anyone who attacks someone else's ideas, no matter how evil those ideas are, are arrested by the government and often executed. Into this world comes a carnival psychic named Jones, a man who is doomed to repeat every year of his life. Hence his precognitive abilities only extend one year at a time. To counterattack against the tyranny of treating all people and ideas as equal, Jones creates a ministry of fear and paranoia that is at once equal to the McCarthy mania of the 50's (in this case the evil enemy are giant unicellular creatures who are floating harmlessly down towards the earth but Jones has declared as malicious invaders). He is also a fundamentalist preacher who spread hatred and the lingering shadow of the fascists of WWII and their oppresive police state. The plot branches into several strange subplots including a drug den for the wealthy where hermaphrodites make love on stage while morphing from one sex to another and a secret government experiment to genetically engineer a group of humans who could survive the atmosphere of Venus. One of the hidden gems of this novel is the portrayal of the government security agent Cussick. He is an early prototype for the Rick Dekkard of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (a.k.a. Blade Runner). A hired gun of the government just doing his job and trying to protect his paycheck while a cynical wife acts as a conscience to the evil that her husband has aligned himself with. The scene where Cussick and a fellow government agent go out on the town with their wives is both rich in character detail and psychology. In these scenes are traces of the mainstream Dick. The writing also reveals glimpses of a much more potent literary talent. In this scene Cussick and his wife make love while Jone's voice rants on the radio much like Hitler: "Locked in each other's arms, bare bodies pressed together, they were already a universe apart. Separated by the ceaseless, muffled metallic drumming of the man's voice that beat against the walls from a long way off, the never-ending harsh mutter of words, gestures, speeches. The untiring din of an impassioned man." A book not for the unitiated, but a must for the PKD fanatic.
Rating:
Summary: Author and Character Try for Greatness
Review: This was one of PKD's first novels, and it shows - although the plot has some strong original elements in it, the language and manner of telling are pretty standard-issue for postwar SF. The man hadn't found his style yet. In fact, in some ways he resembled his title character, certain that the future held great things but only able to see ahead towards more struggle. Fortunately for us, PKD was a much better man than the Floyd Jones of this story. Jones, unlike PKD, is a fascist, a xenophobe, and a weasel. He is precognitive, sees the future, but only one year ahead. He must relive even the most vile and unpleasant incidents twice over, and he can still be - and often is - wrong and wrongheaded. All the more remarkable that the author should invent a character like that in the early days of science fiction, when those with mental powers were generally heroic. Or at any rate oppressed and misunderstood, sympathetic characters for readers to identify with (think X-Men). Once again, PKD takes a standard SF device and turns it inside out. So much for the villain - in this case as in many others, the most interesting character in the story. The heroes, a dedicated policeman and his radically-inclined wife, are by comparison a couple of marshmallows. Unlike many fictional married couples, however, these two at least have an interesting relationship - bound by a great love but separated by clashing political beliefs. Take the scene where the policeman learns that his wife has been working for a revolutionary underground behind his back for many months. The moment is enormously moving, and would bring a reader to tears if the characters themselves had more than two dimensions each. While all of this is going on, you have to consider a group of mutated humans, the most benign alien invasion in literature, and a desperate attempt to colonize Venus. Why did PKD throw in all this extra material? The temptation is strong to say it was because all science fiction of the 1950's had to have mutants, aliens, and space travel. The later PKD had more confidence in the products of his imagination than in such clichés. That, in a nutshell, is the problem with this book - in far too many places it reads like a sort of technical schematic for a PKD novel, not the novel itself. If you took any second-class genre piece of its day and read it through a slightly warped pair of glasses, you'd get stuff like this - enough mutation to call attention to itself, not enough to really intrigue. It's an adequate piece of experimentation and not much more. PKD just hadn't given himself permission to really cut loose yet. The World Jones Made has all the flaws of its time and its genre - there's too much incident for a 180-page novel, the action leaps from place to place and time to time until you get seasick, and the whole thing has that deadly aura of seriousness about it that we all remember from Twilight Zone. Definitely not the place to start for the aspiring PKD reader - the author had a lot of growing to do after finishing this piece. Happily, he did it in pretty short order and gave us greater work. Benshlomo says, Everybody needs a little practice starting out.
Rating:
Summary: Author and Character Try for Greatness
Review: This was one of PKD's first novels, and it shows - although the plot has some strong original elements in it, the language and manner of telling are pretty standard-issue for postwar SF. The man hadn't found his style yet. In fact, in some ways he resembled his title character, certain that the future held great things but only able to see ahead towards more struggle. Fortunately for us, PKD was a much better man than the Floyd Jones of this story. Jones, unlike PKD, is a fascist, a xenophobe, and a weasel. He is precognitive, sees the future, but only one year ahead. He must relive even the most vile and unpleasant incidents twice over, and he can still be - and often is - wrong and wrongheaded. All the more remarkable that the author should invent a character like that in the early days of science fiction, when those with mental powers were generally heroic. Or at any rate oppressed and misunderstood, sympathetic characters for readers to identify with (think X-Men). Once again, PKD takes a standard SF device and turns it inside out. So much for the villain - in this case as in many others, the most interesting character in the story. The heroes, a dedicated policeman and his radically-inclined wife, are by comparison a couple of marshmallows. Unlike many fictional married couples, however, these two at least have an interesting relationship - bound by a great love but separated by clashing political beliefs. Take the scene where the policeman learns that his wife has been working for a revolutionary underground behind his back for many months. The moment is enormously moving, and would bring a reader to tears if the characters themselves had more than two dimensions each. While all of this is going on, you have to consider a group of mutated humans, the most benign alien invasion in literature, and a desperate attempt to colonize Venus. Why did PKD throw in all this extra material? The temptation is strong to say it was because all science fiction of the 1950's had to have mutants, aliens, and space travel. The later PKD had more confidence in the products of his imagination than in such clichés. That, in a nutshell, is the problem with this book - in far too many places it reads like a sort of technical schematic for a PKD novel, not the novel itself. If you took any second-class genre piece of its day and read it through a slightly warped pair of glasses, you'd get stuff like this - enough mutation to call attention to itself, not enough to really intrigue. It's an adequate piece of experimentation and not much more. PKD just hadn't given himself permission to really cut loose yet. The World Jones Made has all the flaws of its time and its genre - there's too much incident for a 180-page novel, the action leaps from place to place and time to time until you get seasick, and the whole thing has that deadly aura of seriousness about it that we all remember from Twilight Zone. Definitely not the place to start for the aspiring PKD reader - the author had a lot of growing to do after finishing this piece. Happily, he did it in pretty short order and gave us greater work. Benshlomo says, Everybody needs a little practice starting out.
Rating: 
Summary: Glimpses of an untested PKD
Review: True, The World Jones Made is an early entry into the pantheon of Dick's works and thus is devoid of the massive, week long acid trips, intense paranoia, and general tampering with reality that fills his later works. But I still enjoyed this book, and just because it is more conventional and straightforward than his other books does not mean it is less interesting. In this book I found the same remarkable talent for character development, especially in the character of Jones himself, a lowly fortune teller transformed into a passionate revolutionary and then finally elevated to messiah status as his gift for prescience becomes apparent. The sidestory of the Venusian colonists is also well crafted, and it links with the main story seamlessly at the conclusion. It's incredibly imaginative, as are all Dick's works with the possible exception of The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, and that is what's really admirable about this book. The suppressive philosophy of Relativism, poised to instate a modern Age of Metternech and smother the dreams of all the world's inhabitants is an astute interpretation of the Western world after World War II. And Jones is an excellent instrument, in the deft hands of Dick, by which to voice protest against this frightening trend, and all movements which would seek to curb the power of the human imagination.
Rating:
Summary: In The End It All Stays The Same.
Review: Writing reviews on Philip Dick's works is unsettling and leaves one open for all sorts of criticism - it is hard to encapsulate all the ideas he floated in each novel. He was a master of conceptual thinking and a great writer of science fiction and futuristic thought. He considered notions and concepts that most authors would kill to be able to have as original thought let alone be able to put them into the public thought pool as worthwhile and interesting fiction.
'The World Jones Made' is a story based around a simple and fascinating premise. A human is born who can live a year ahead of the rest of us mere mortals. In other words, what we experience today he already knows. There is a catch, of course. A year is not necessarily all that predictive of outcomes that take many years to develop. So you can get it wrong though with interesting consequences, as our character discovers.
The central character is Floyd Jones. We are taken along his life's journey and the impact his future sense has on society and the future. Dick weaves this journey into a future society with notions of an Orwellian 'big brother' gone politically correct or as Dick calls it 'Relativism'.
This is not a book for space opera fans but one for the long suffering traditionalist who wants to ponder some concepts that will leave him wondering 'why didn't I think of that?'
Somehow Dick gets to include in the story - themes of space travel, alien cultures, genetic modification and a raft of other traditional sci-fi concepts. There is no doubt that Dick is a true speculative genius and many a reader will sit quietly contemplating his words and ideas long after the book is finished. Dick just does that to people!
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